Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced American Product Distributors, Avianca Holdings, CA Technologies, CBTS, Cisco, and FICO as finalists for the ninth annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. The awards honor Red Hat customers, partners, and communities for their outstanding and innovative use of Red Hat solutions, and the finalists will be honored in Boston during the 2015 Red Hat Summit, the industry's premier open source technology event, June 23-26, 2015.

Red Hat Innovation Award winners were selected by a panel of experts and ranked based on the complexity, uniqueness, and magnitude of their Red Hat implementations. Category winners will compete for the title of 2015 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. That winner will be determined by the open source community via online voting from June 22-24, 2015. The Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be announced on June 25, 2015.

Category: Accelerate, Integrate, AutomateRecognizing the best overall acceleration, integration, and automation of IT workloads using Red Hat solutions.

Winner: American Product Distributors

American Product Distributors, Inc. (APD) provides custom procurement solutions to large organizations. Through its Value Innovation Technologies subsidiary, APD wanted to update its proprietary ecommerce platform and create a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for large enterprises to save money and give management control by empowering their employees to make smarter purchasing decisions when buying online. APD turned to Red Hat Consulting to lead the design, implementation, testing and production rollout of APD’s new eLink™ Gateway system, built with Red Hat JBoss Middleware. eLink™ Gateway uses big data analytics and customized electronic catalogs with automated management controls to help clients maximize cost savings on the products and services they purchase. Through product-comparison features, eLink Gateway is designed to let users automatically buy the most cost-efficient item available every time an order is placed. APD says the solution has reduced its total cost of ownership by 25 percent and trimmed capital expenditures by 52 percent.

Category: TransformRecognizing the best use of Red Hat solutions to transform an IT department from a call center to a business partner that provides self-service and useful automation.

Winner: Avianca Holdings

Red Hat Consulting helped Avianca, the oldest airline in Latin America, architect, build, and deploy a faster, more robust enterprise infrastructure. Avianca chose Red Hat JBoss Middleware as the primary integration layer for the entire organization. Red Hat JBoss Middleware now supports Avianca's main critical business applications and lets Avianca integrate new companies into the group more quickly and efficiently. The Red Hat solution delivers a consistent experience for Avianca's customers at points of contact around the world. Avianca expects that the solution will result in a 50 percent reduction in total cost of ownership and a 100 percent increase in return on investment.

Category: Application DevelopmentRecognizing the most outstanding use of agile methodologies and Red Hat solutions to achieve superior overall performance while creating, maintaining, and deploying successful business applications – whether they are traditional, mobile, or cloud.

Winner: CA Technologies

To help its enterprise customers seize the opportunities of the application economy, CA Technologies wanted to get its world-class IT management applications to market much faster. Using OpenShift Enterprise, CA Technologies provided an enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to its internal development teams to more quickly build and deploy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications for external customers. Deployment times dropped from months to a matter of days in most cases. The new system offers high scalability by automatically spinning up or spinning down servers based on the current user load. The company says the solution has driven dramatically faster release cycles for CA’s SaaS solutions and provides high-value features to unlock business value for its customers.

Category: ModernizeRecognizing the most outstanding transition from an aging, proprietary infrastructure and restrictive vendors to standardized, open source solutions.

Winner: CBTS

CBTS, a global cloud solution provider based in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area, wanted to replace its cloud platform with a solution that would meet complex customer needs without raising operational costs. With Red Hat CloudForms, CBTS created a self-service provisioning portal for its current managed service cloud offering. The company automated and streamlined customer support processes and standardized its managed services offerings to support hundreds of customer accounts. CBTS reports that Red Hat's solution increased efficiency 65 percent, sped up time to market by 200 percent, and accelerated sales cycles by 100 percent.

Cisco IT faces many of the same IT challenges organizations face every day yet also benefits from deploying products and technologies from Cisco, the leading provider of global network infrastructure. Cisco IT sought to create a modern on-premise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment where 1,000+ of its developers could easily design and build applications. Using OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat as a foundation, Cisco IT created the Lightweight Application Environment (LAE), which runs on top of Cisco’s internal private cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The LAE platform helps speed time to capability, increase operational efficiency, cut hardware costs, and improve security and development agility; all while supporting a continuous delivery environment.

Leading analytics software company FICO helps businesses in more than 90 countries make better decisions that drive higher levels of growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. FICO wanted to extend its successful, high-end analytics business into new industries and markets. To capitalize on the growing demand for Big Data analytics among companies of all sizes, the company sought to complement its on-premise solution with a web-based service. Using OpenShift Enterprise, the company developed FICO® Analytic Cloud. The new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering has driven more than US$10 million in sales in a short time frame, winning business from companies that otherwise couldn't have afforded the time or cost of implementing FICO’s sophisticated analytics solutions. Using the Red Hat technology, FICO reduced infrastructure operations staffing by 20 percent, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware costs, and improved time to market by 70 percent.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

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